Nothing More French
by Gracie Bialecki
To get to the media library, la médiathèque, where I write, I walk up one of my favorite streets in Paris, Rue Faubourg Saint-Denis. It starts at La Porte Saint-Denis, a triumphal arc built in 1672 which marks the ancient city walls. Heading north, the narrow street is jumbled with Indian grocers and French coffee roasters, one of the few in Paris where boutique fromageries and florists share walls with Kurdish sandwich shops and African restaurants. I pass crates of fresh mint and crowded café tables until the sidewalk dead-ends in a square of benches and weedy bushes. Standing inside and spreading out along the fence are groups of African men drinking beer or smoking hash mixed with tobacco, its unmistakable musk filling the air.
I walk past the square, into the médiatheque’s lobby where old men read newspapers, and take four flights of stairs. Up past the strollers and shelves of picture books, past the tables where students study in flirty clusters, and to the mezzanine with its rows of quiet freelancers. From the windows I can see the spire of the Eiffel Tower and down below the children flocking in the adjacent schoolyard, their seagull cries circling upwards.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been sitting next to a fedora-ed female computer scientist. When she finally leans over and asks if I’m writing a novel, and I say yes, she replies, “Chapeau.” Literally, hats off, tipping the fedora towards me. Sometimes I feel there’s nothing more French than a day spent writing at the médiathèque, eating lunch in the courtyard, and browsing the archaic paper posts on the community bulletin board.
Recently I met another American writer in Paris, Thomas Chatterton Williams, who lives in my neighborhood and has spent more time than I exploring the dynamics of merging demographics. His memoir, Self-Portrait in Black and White, describes his journey to stop explicitly identifying with a set race. Rather than reducing his identity to blackness, when Williams is asked about his race, he’ll talk about his parents and grandparents—identifying with a lineage instead of a label.
Though the catalyst for this shift was the birth of his blonde-haired daughter, it also came from his experience in France—a country which defines him as American rather than by the color of his skin. When we talk about his current cultural identity, he takes a similarly nuanced approach. He can laugh at the way he butchers French while still admitting he feels more and more out of place on his trips back to the States. His work touches on these complications of defining ourselves, and how our self-perception not only comes from the way we see ourselves but also how we're seen in the eyes of others.
The more the French view me as part of their country, the more I see myself as belonging here with them. With my blonde hair and daily scarves, I look the part. It’s easier to accept superficial validation such as compliments on my accent and cultural ease from the French than it is to reconcile my fading American patriotism. I avoid political conversations with the Europeans who welcome me and don’t know how to explain the United States’ newfound passion for walls. Three centuries after America was founded, the opportunities have reversed and it’s now Europe which offers me freedom to pursue creative dreams. France supports me in concrete ways with health care and other miraculously accessible social government services, as well as its deep cultural affirmation of artists and their work.
In November at the appointment to renew my visa, the line snaked outside of the prefecture. It was a clear morning and I compared myself to the other immigrants—a silky-haired daughter helping her mother with paperwork, a robed family speaking a language I couldn’t place. Did any of us belong here more or less than the others? We were all waiting, dossiers in hand, for the most definitive form of approval. I believed in the pure bureaucracy of the government’s mandated documents. If we had every paper on the list, then how could they deny us?
Inside the bureau the queue gave way to minor chaos. A shabby bearded man started berating the official who’d denied his visa, screaming as security guards dragged him away. Minutes after, I breezed through my appointment and the woman said she was delighted to have met me. It was impossible to ignore the privilege of my passport color, the centuries’ history of our countries aiding each other.
When I mention this to Williams he agrees that Americans have always had a favored immigration status. France’s amity stretches from the birth of the United States through the liberation of Paris during World War II. Even now expats tell me that the navy blue U.S. passport has a greater impact at the Office of Immigration than skin color. Williams brings up a piece he'd written for the New Yorker about the parallel xenophobia of France’s Nationalist moment and the U.S. Alt-Right. He’d been interviewing Renaud Camus, a leader of the movement in France, and cheekily asked what Camus thought of him—a mixed-race immigrant American with a French wife. Williams pauses as he remembers Camus' reply.
“There is nothing more French,” he starts to say, and I finish with him, “than an American in Paris!” I’d read the piece just before moving here and found Camus’ words so comforting they were still lodged in my mind. In my nervousness to leave my home country, he promised that I’d be the epitome of Frenchness rather than an unwelcome étrangère. It should’ve mattered that the sentiment came from a man who despises political refugees, but at the time it didn’t. If he was saying there was nothing more French than an American, then I knew no one would question my status.
At the médiathèque I’m a perfect chameleon, writing my novel alongside the approving strangers and saying “bonne soirée” to the librarians as I head home past the hash square. When I ask Williams, he knows the park, and we both wonder at the socioeconomic conditions that allow the men to linger all day. They’re neither refugees nor homeless. Rather, they occupy the space as though it were their living room, playing music and meeting friends. I tell Williams about how I smoked with them the one time I bought hash. When I said I was going to the médiathèque, they told me their friend worked there as a security guard. Williams and I agree that having a job makes the security guard more integrated into society than his dealer friends. I don’t ask if his government job also makes him inherently more French. He’s already dressed the part in his belted slacks and polo, countries away from the other men outside.
It wasn’t until after I’d finished Self-Portrait in Black and White that I realized I’d always thought of the men in park as African, though of course, they’re French. They might’ve been born in France, but even more certainly they had lived in this country longer than I have. Subconsciously, I had been considering myself more French: I had the accent, the European features, and the Parisian partner who was teaching me wine and cheese regions. The closer I was to fitting myself into this caricature of a definition, the more I could believe that I belong in my adopted country.
Being welcomed in France had made me feel superior—a privilege trap enforcing isolationism and unequal social structures. Believing someone typifies a nationality or race is a divisive judgment which draws unnecessary, imaginary boundaries. Defining national identity by nothing more than years of tradition leaves no room for current and future generations, for the people who are bringing their tangled selves to a new home. In his memoir, Williams quotes the economist Glen Loury who urges us to keep striving for “a universally transcendent humanism…” Realizing the African men in the park could be considered French was both a surprise and a relief. It lightened my own pressure to be the perfectly integrated immigrant and brought me closer to others. We’re all French, if we see ourselves that way.
Weed and hash are illegal in France and thankfully the police have better laws to enforce. Still, when construction fences go up around the square, it feels like the government paving over a problem and calling it beautification instead of displacement. According to posted plans, the new park will combine the smoker’s corner with a rundown playground to create a public space that’s an extension of the médiathèque’s inclusive community. Even if the new walls aren't built to keep the men out, I wonder if they'll have that effect. The demographics could sway so they're outnumbered by parents and strollers. If the park becomes family domain, where will that leave the smokers? In a city filled with manicured gardens, the old disheveled square was a place all their own.
When I walk home at sunset, I skirt the orange fences. Williams doesn’t live far from here and I wonder if his children will grow up playing in the new park. The demolition is intensive—months of excavators and sledgehammers. There are fewer men now, some still smoking, others leaning on the barriers or sitting on the curb. They lounge with an easy attitude, not waiting, just carrying on like nothing has changed.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France.
